Skins Quotes: Violence, Jedis and Drinking Blood

Violent game. But not in the negative sense. (By John McDonnell - TWP)

A few nice Skins quotes from the week before Cleveland's first visit to town since the Soulja Boy series....

* To start, Jim Zorn. Yet again, he called Clinton Portis violent yesterday. That must be at least a dozen times he's used that particular adjective to describe Portis. I asked Zorn how that word entered his vocabulary when describing the NFL.

"It's just, it is," Zorn said. "Now violence, ok, it's not meant in the negative sense. It's just I've played in it, and if you don't come--even as a quarterback--to play, knowing that this game is played by hard men in a hard way, then you probably aren't gonna be in it very long."

So I asked if he had played violent; "absolutely," he said.

* Next, Shaun Alexander. He's apparently a featured character in next week's Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel on HBO, which focuses on the legendary Dr. James Andrews. The show has distributed some quotes in advance, and the newest Redskin offered up a dandy about Andrews.

"He's got that magic touch," Alexander told the program. "You break something and he doesn't really have to do anything. He just kinda put his hand on you a little bit and heals up."

* Next, Casey Rabach. I was asking him some hunting questions for another Bog episode, coming up shortly, when he volunteered this:

"I actually drank the blood of the first deer I killed," Rabach said. "You have to, yeah. It's a rite of passage."

Why, I ventured to ask.

"Why do we breathe air?" he replied. "I mean, to survive."

* And finally, Antwaan Randle El. The haters are hating on his punt return navigational skills, so I asked whether he's going left and right more than he has in the past.

"No, uh uh, not at all," he said. "I try to go to either side and then try to get up the field. Sometimes I may have a right return, so I have to go to the right, but for the most part I'm just taking what they're giving us, and we didn't have a whole lot the first couple weeks. It kind of opened up the last two or three weeks, and this week was rough, but again, we had some opportunities there, we were just one or two blocks away."

As for running into Kareem Moore on that second-half return?

"Extremely close to really breaking that thing open, so I wouldn't consider that a set back," Randle El said, as Moore walked by and grimaced. "Hey, I'm being honest baby. I'm not putting you under the bus," Randle El said.

So, without running into Moore, was he gone?

"It was out the gate," Randle El said. "Noooo question. Nooobody left....It was over with. It was a wrap."